Identity

The motion picture "Running Brave" it's about a half-Indian half-white boy, who loves to run and gets a scholarship to Kansas University to be on the cross country varsity team. Throughout the movie we can see how the protagonist, Billy Mills, struggles with the ethnicity problem at this decade. At first we can see how the coach didn't want to recruit him because he was half-Indian, and he believed Indians were quitters and couldn’t adapt to the "white" people lifestyle. Native Americans where really proud of their origins and they didn’t want to do anything with white people, and we can see this at the beginning of the movie when Billy is leaving for college and his family/friends tell him to remember which half of his is better than the other one, obviously referring to the Indian one. I will like to make something clear; Indian is not the right term for this people, since they are not Indians but Native Americans.  But the movie uses this term so I’m going to continue using this wrong term.

The movie has a great message, since it touches a part that most of us don’t dare to talk about: identity. Billy Mills feels that he should stay true to his half-Indian part and not give in to the white half. But he now lives in a “white” world, as the movie states, and he has to learn to live there. It’s hard for him since he is discriminated by everyone all because his ethnicity. But he doesn’t give up; he has a goal and he is going to achieve it, one way or another. He adapts and learns to live in this world, but learning to live in this new world earns him problems with his relatives back at the reservation. He gets a visit from them, and they judge him because they believe he has forgotten who he truly was and where he was from. So he has problems from both parts, and he feels lost and doesn’t know where he truly belongs. He feels he doesn’t know his real identity. At first this makes him stop running, all of this and pressure had made him lost the love he had for running in the first place. But he gets back up, he graduates, trains, joins the marines, and go to the Olympics; and he wins, because no matter the bad things life brings us we can always get back up and continue the race. And “it takes a winner to come from behind and win”.

So it’s important to know, that identity means who you are and staying true to yourself. No matter where you come from or where you go, your identity is who you truly are no matter where or with whom.